The Most Important Email Marketing Metrics and KPIs

When it comes to email marketing analytics, there are quite a lot of metrics you could track to manage the overall success of your email campaigns. Therefore, where should you start? How do you actually know which email metrics are essential to track?

Firstly, it depends on the goals of each email campaign (for instance, you wouldn’t follow the same email metrics for lead generation campaigns as you would customer acquisition campaigns.)

Each email marketing campaign may be different, particularly if you have different goals for various campaigns (e.g., growing a subscriber base and generating leads). Still, there are some metrics every email marketer should learn how to track.

Continue reading to find out the email marketing metrics that every marketing specialist should track in your campaigns.

How to know which email marketing metrics to track?

The following is a broad list of the most common email marketing metrics that businesses are using to track the success of their email campaigns, keep in mind that when the goals of your campaigns change, so too should the email metrics you’re following.

Lead Generation

If you want to promote newsletters, ebooks, and other forms of experience to create a relationship with clients who may not be ready to purchase products, then lead generation is your goal.

In the following email campaigns, we measure things like click rate, conversion rates, etc., to regulate the success email campaigns have on nurturing subscribers closer to a possible sale.

It might not make sense to focus on downstream metrics like how many purchases were made because these people may not be ready yet for that. Instead, we need to follow the level of engagement they have with content.

You might prioritize metrics like ‘unsubscribe rate’ to ensure that the content you are providing people is resonating with them. You don’t want to destroy the email list you created with promoting irrelevant content.

Customer Acquisition

Having this goal, you’ll focus more on metrics that track the behavior of purchase; for instance, metrics like the purchase itself, conversion rate, purchase rate, etc.

Even though you still care about tracking metrics like open rates and click rates because people won’t purchase if they’re haven’t seen your email message. Although you should focus more on purchase behavior to know the overall success of the campaign. If you are looking for a great tool online vendor, we highly recommend considering the CS-Cart Multi-Vendor Marketplace platform, It suits any kind of online market from a big shopping mall to a mix of a marketplace and even a social network.

Customer Marketing

When you’re running customer marketing email campaigns, you might place more emphasis on engagement and usage metrics that tell you the actions that your email campaign helped to influence.

For example, things like click rate don’t matter in this case, because even if the click rate is excellent, if the email didn’t inspire a product usage, it eventually wasn’t a success.

Email marketing metrics to follow

Open Rate metric

Shortly, the open rate is how many times people opened your emails. It’s shown as a percentage number and is calculated by dividing opened emails by emails successfully sent (excepting those that bounced).

According to Sender research, the average open rate is about 24%, Comparing the results of 2018 and 2020, we can see that the average open rate increased by 3.2%.

Much like email deliverability, you want to track trends in the open rate numbers and adjust accordingly to it.

You might want to connect your open rates to what’s typical for your industry to have a benchmark. Make sure the comparison is industry-specific since some industries have higher numbers. For example, finance and hospitality usually see higher open rates, which makes sense that subscribers are going to open emails from their banks and the hotels more often. For example, according to the 2020 results, an open rate of governmental emails is 30.50% and retail 13.90%, so know the difference in your industry.

Clickthrough Rate

Email click-through rate or CTR shows you how many times the links in your emails were clicked. Shown as a percentage and is calculates by dividing recorded clicks by the number of emails successfully delivered (without bounced emails). 

Sender created statistics of what type of links are clicked the most. We see that the most clicked attachment of the email is File/Link to invoice or other payment. It’s five times more popular from different categories like a link to blog or post, link to offer or promotion, link to poll.

Unsubscribe Rate

I believe you don’t need to explain what the unsubscribe rate is. Although there’s so much, you can learn from this rate. For instance, it means subscribers didn’t report your email as spam; they are just not interested in your content anymore.

Follow the trends in your unsubscribe rate, especially after you make any changes like targeting, an email redesign, or a new sending schedule. If the number of unsubscribes quickly goes up in response to the change, you’ll need to rethink the move.

Don’t forget that subscribers who unsubscribed don’t want to be on your list anymore. They are voluntarily leaving, which is much better for the long-term well-being of your deliverability.

Conversion Rate

Don’t assume that conversion rate means only money. Depending on the aim of your campaign, a conversion might be a purchase, or it could be registration for a party, a subscription, downloading an ebook, or something else.

Eventually, you can have different goals for your email marketing KPIs. Knowing why you’re measuring it is as valuable as knowing what you’re measuring, and this is true when it comes to following conversions.

The best conversion rate arises from Abandoned Cart reminders; another email is Follow-Up or Reminders. This year those numbers improved, Abandoned Cart email increased by 1,5% and Reminders by 0,9%.

Bounce Rate

Bounce is what happens when emails don’t go to the subscriber or are returned to the sender. Why do emails bounce? 

• It could be the subscriber’s conditional filters;
• They have a full inbox;
•  Incorrect email address.

Bounce rates are divided into the hard bounce and soft bounce.

A hard bounce occurs when your email is rejected because the email address is invalid or doesn’t exist.

A soft bounce is when the email reaches the subscriber but bounces back. For example, the mailbox of the recipient is full, but there’s still a chance that future emails will be successfully delivered.

List Growth Rate

This statistical number tells you the rate at which your email list is growing. It’s necessary to know whether your email list is growing and at what percentage. If your rate is below average, or worse, you need to reevaluate your communication. If your list growth rate is high, you need to be concerned that your engagement metrics, like open stay high, too.

Overall ROI

To increase your company’s revenue, also follow the overall return on investment for your campaigns. Overall ROI is total revenue divided by spend.

Like every marketing channel, you should be able to maintain the overall ROI of your email marketing KPIs if you haven’t set up and selected different values to various types of signs based on their possibility to generate revenue for your company.

• How many of each of these types of leads did you make via email marketing?
• How does this alter to potential revenue? 
• What is the actual revenue?

According to Sender statistics, the ROI increased x41 times this year; it means if you will spend 1$ returns 41$ revenue. Sounds great, right? Count how much do you earn from email marketing is it below average or above.

Our goal today was to give you an in-depth analysis of email marketing metrics as we possibly could. We hope that you took something away from it and you start using it in your email marketing plan.